The Hedgehog's Dilemma

by Hugh Warwick

  There is plenty of food, water and sunshine, and our friends are warm and comfortable.

  All the animals who had been ill and old are restored to health and vigor; those who were hurt or maimed are made whole and strong again, just as we remember them in our dreams of days and times gone by.

  The animals are happy and content, except for one small thing; they each miss someone very special to them, who had to be left behind.

  They all run and play together, but the day comes when one suddenly stops and looks into the distance. His bright eyes are intent; his eager body quivers. Suddenly he begins to run from the group, Xying over the green grass, his legs carrying him faster and faster.

  You have been spotted, and when you and your special friend finally meet, you cling together in joyous reunion, never to be parted again. The happy kisses rain upon your face; your hands again caress the beloved head, and you look once more into the trusting eyes of your pet, so long gone from your life but never absent from your heart.

  Then you cross Rainbow Bridge together . . .

  As the ceremony – well, I use the word lightly, it was a Powerpoint presentation – continued, I watched all around me crumple into tears. Picture followed picture of hedgehogs who have departed in the two years since the last meeting. With each picture are a few words about the character of the animal and details of the carer. Sometimes a particular image would cause a gasp of sobbing from somewhere in the room and you knew who had lost that hedgehog.

  By the end there was just one pair of dry eyes in the house – mine. I was amazed, and slightly jealous of not being able to join in the great exuberance of grief. I have never seen the likes of this for other animals. People talked more passionately about the bond with hedgehogs than they did about their own family members.

  One of the purposes of the hedgehog show is to raise money for a number of rescue centres, including the one run by Standing Bear. And a big feature of the evening is the auction. Hedgehoggery is on offer in all its forms: model hedgehogs with acupuncture needles as spines, books and a large patchwork quilt. Hundreds of dollars are raised from some wonderful, and some less wonderful, material.

  The atmosphere changed as a call went up to ‘get out the worms’.

  Brenda, a breeder who runs Heaven Sent Hedgehogs, was busy with some tubes. I looked closer. They were about 15 centimetres long and half filled with green jelly. Someone said something about ‘jello shots’, but I was none the wiser. Then I saw what she was putting into the tubes. Wriggling on top of the green jelly was a mass of maggots. And shouts went out – ‘How much am I bid? How much to see Brenda eat the worms?’ Money started to flow forward as the recently sobbing crowd rallied into a baying throng – ‘Eat the worms, eat the worms.’

  Brenda flamboyantly raised a tube so the crowd could see the contents – the bidding was over $100 already. She put one end of the tube into her mouth, beckoned forth a volunteer who took the other end in his mouth and gave a hard blow, expelling jelly (turns out it is tequila jelly) and maggots into the victim.

  Then the odd voice started saying, ‘What about Hugh?’ – and others joined them. I am sure I could have raised quite a merry penny for hedgehog rescuers across the USA, but maggots? Even though they call them worms, they are mealworms and they look like maggots. Actually, would it make a difference if they were worms? My sister ate worms when young, but I have not eaten any meat in over twenty years and I wasn’t about to start with wriggling maggots – never mind how many hedgehogs I might have saved. Oh, and then I found that the jelly was made with gelatine, so I was provided with plenty of excuses.

  Jennifer, editor of the Hedgehog Welfare Society’s newsletter, grabbed a handful and was disappointed to only get an offer of $40, but wolfed them down anyway – and she did it again later when she found that her exploits had not been caught on camera. The evening felt like anarchy was about to break out, but order was restored by a wonderfully talented band, Dakota Blond, who provided a couple of hours of top-quality entertainment, though I must apologize for missing a chunk in the middle as I was recruited to join a beer run (the hotel’s provision was rather pricey).

  A group of five of us bundled out of the main door to be met by heavy rain. I was just following the pack, so we ended up in someone’s car for the lengthy drive to the other side of the road . . . apparently this is a fairly typical American response to a problem. After the music we retired to the hospitality suite with our collection of local micro-brews and had a wonderful evening during which I learned much, much that can probably not make it into the book, but suffice it to say there is a porn star nicknamed ‘The Hedgehog’.

  * From Mrs Beeton’s drinks recipes: ‘To make Negus – to every pint of port wine allow 1 quart of boiling water, 1/4 lb of sugar, 1 lemon, grated nutmeg to taste.’ This was a drink served at children’s parties . . . and I thought giving them fizzy drinks was dodgy.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  Hugh’s

  Hedgehog

  It has long been a fantasy of mine – to embark on a quest to find all fourteen species of spiny hedgehog and possibly even keep a look out for the pretenders, the gymnures and moonrats. This multi-continent mission would take me from my home to the eastern and southern limits of Eurasia and down to the tail of Africa – an Old World quest for an ancient animal.

  But in 2007 I was happy to settle for a slightly less extravagant expedition – a search for the bleeding obvious.

  A hedgehog called Hugh; a hedgehog about which almost nothing is known. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists Hemiechinus hughi as ‘vulnerable’. This means that it faces a high risk of extinction in the wild in the medium term. They believe its habitat in China is severely fragmented, something that seems all too common for our spiny friends.

  The idea had loitered around for a while. I searched for more information but found nothing; not even a photograph of hughi. The closest I got was the website of Belle & Dean, producers of organic clothes for children. Amazingly, founder and illustrator, Issy, had come across a reference to Hugh’s hedgehog and created a hedgehog print that adorns Babygros and T-shirts.

  I began to feel a need, a need that transcended logic, to find this hedgehog and photograph my namesake before it vanished for good. And from a purely personal point of view, I wanted to know who was the Hugh after whom it was named.

  I began to daydream about donning a leather jacket and battered trilby and heading off on a 1930s-style expedition. Somewhere between the drama of Indiana Jones and the passion of The English Patient – I was the explorer, dusty, tired yet dashingly rugged. A canvas bag over my shoulder would contain a historic notebook filled with great thoughts, witty quotes (probably in Latin) and immaculate sketches. Possibly there would be a conflict with an evil hedgehog collector.

  When I first mentioned my idea of going to China to find hughi, Pat Morris laughed: ‘No one will take you seriously again.’ I had to remind him that actually there were precious few who did, so I was not too worried about that.

  What an absurd adventure. When I sat down to plan it, taking into consideration time, money and language, it began to look just a little more complicated. I made a great breakthrough early on by finding Professor Wang Song, mammal expert at the Institute of Zoology in Beijing. Not only did I find him, but he also responded immediately to my email of introduction. He pointed me towards the Natural History Museum in London; he had heard they had a specimen.

  The curatorial staff at the South Kensington museum are amazing. Their world mixes the Victorian with the modern. Computer databases quickly link up items that would have taken hours to research, while the workstations are wreathed in the musty smell of old leather-bound books. A perfect match. I began in the library. The snippets of information I had found along the way gave a reference to the first mention of hughi in a paper presented by Michael Rogers Oldfield Thomas in 1908.

  Oldfield Thomas, as he was known to all, worked his way up the ranks
of the Natural History Museum, from clerk to foremost collector. In his time he managed to increase enormously the number of mammal specimens held by the museum, employing collectors around the world. He also named over 2,000 new species before his retirement in 1923. In a poignant conclusion to his personal history, just a few months after the death of his beloved wife he took his own life, acknowledging that he could not manage without her.

  The paper was published in the Proceedings of the General Meetings for Scientific Business of the Zoological Society of London:

  A very dark-coloured, finely speckled species, quite unlike any of the other Chinese hedgehogs. Spines light basally as in E.miodon, but the dark ring is much broader, and is followed by quite a narrow light ring, only about 0.5 to 0.8 mm. in length, the point for about the same length is again dark. As a result the whole animal is very dark with a fine whitish ticking, and has quite a different appearance to the broadly washed whitish of the other species. Head, limbs, and belly brown.

  Hind foot of type 38 mm.

  Hab[itat]. Paochi, Shen-si.

  Type [specimen]. Adult female. B.M. No. 0.6.27.2. Presented and collected by Father Hugh.

  And there it was, the first reference to the Hugh in question. Further digging revealed a Father Hugh at the Catholic Mission in Hankow, China, who supplied many species to Oldfield Thomas, including ninety-four species of bird from the province of ‘Shen-si’. The librarians dug up a magical tome for me. Sometimes I find that books can convey so much more than just the information they contain and this was a case in point. It was a bound collection of letters to Oldfield Thomas, an amazing insight into the life of a naturalist at the turn of the last century.

  There was something very sad about the library. I asked what they were doing with the change to electronic communication, as the archive I had my hands on was such an invaluable source of information. There was a pause and then the awful truth came out. The library has not had a budget to even file the correspondence arriving since 1999.

  Sitting in the library, locked away from the hubbub of the busy museum corridors, the great tragedy this short-sighted economy represents became clear. We could be living in a new ‘dark age’. Future generations may look back at now and wonder what on earth happened, as there are no records to indicate the amazing achievements and accumulations of knowledge.

  But I had my hands on the very letters that had been written to Oldfield Thomas. The crisp leaves of autumnal paper, patterned with many rhythmic hands, spoke directly to me from the past:

  5th November 1906

  My dear Thomas,

  My Hungarian friends seem indefatigable and are determined to establish the identity of their flying mice.

  With this letter I am sending you per messenger two other kinds of mice. Both of them have been injected with formalin. Will you kindly let me know what they are? The one with the black stripe down the back is a most delightful animal to the uninitiated and I should be very glad if it turned out to be new, and so would my correspondents.

  This is really a case of ‘reflected glory’; you have inspired me with mouse love and I seem to have infected them.

  With kindest regards

  Yours very sincerely

  N C Rothschild

  Unfortunately the letter that had accompanied the specimen of hughi was not to be found, but I did find another letter from Father Hugh, dated 18 February 1899, in which he apologizes for the poor quality of specimens he is able to furnish the museum with and complains bitterly about the difficulty of acquiring traps or ammunition for his guns. The scratchy paper was so thin, like the tracing paper the sadists at my prep school placed in the lavatories, that it was a wonder it had lasted so long. But now it was safe (my hands had been swabbed with alcohol to remove traces of fat that could damage the paper before I was allowed anywhere near the pages).

  After I had finished with the letters to Oldfield Thomas I was handed a small pile of books that referred to my hedgehog (I was beginning to feel quite proprietorial). It was disturbingly small, but there was one map in The Mammals of China that revealed areas where the hedgehog had been seen. Oh my, so few sightings in a country so large. Just twelve dots on the map and each dot, all I had to go on, covered around 1,200 square kilometres, not that far off the area of Greater London. It made me realize that just turning up and going for a wander was not the way to proceed. There was a small cluster around Xi’an and then a lone sighting in Anhui Province. The map also showed the distribution of Hemiechinus dauricus, the Daurian hedgehog, further to the north, suggesting that there was not a great crossover. Another map gave the details of sightings of Hemiechinus auritus, a long-eared desert hog from the north and west of the country, again quite distant from sightings of hughi. However, there was still the chance of meeting unexpected hedgehogs, so the next task was to make sure I knew what hughi looked like.

  The text gave some hints, the most obvious being the dark tips to the spines. But I needed to have a look and amazingly, deep in the bowels of the museum, there was the original specimen handed to Oldfield Thomas by Father Hugh. Curator Daphne Hills led me by regiments of cabinets, past people peering through microscopes at preserved pieces of beasts. The air hung heavy with the scent of stuffed animals, just how a collection is supposed to smell.

  We opened up a cabinet in the far corner and Daphne pulled out a heavy drawer. There were four stiff figures, straight from a hedgehog zombie movie – eyes replaced with cotton wool. There were three species – Hemiechinus auritus, Hemiechinus dauricus and Hemiechinus hughi. Wearing gloves, she transferred them all to a tray. I had to wait a little longer before I could get my hands on hughi as we meandered back through the cabinets to a quiet corner where we could be alone, become better acquainted and get on first-name terms.

  What did I learn from this encounter? What did that dried-up corpse tell me? At least it was slightly better stuffed than some of the other examples I had glimpsed in the cabinet.

  Carefully I picked up hughi. And with good reason did I treat him with reverence. OK, her. That’ll teach me to make assumptions, just because she had the name Hugh. The reverence was due to the fact that she was a ‘type’ specimen. She was the one that defined a new species. When Oldfield Thomas published his paper in 1908, it was based on this very animal.

  That is quite an honour. But also rather disturbing. As I looked closely at her, the only defining feature I could make out was the distinctively dark-tipped spines. While I have never met a hedgehog looking like her, I have met hedgehogs with widely differing spine colours. Could hughi just be a funny-coloured hog?

  Most important for me at that moment was assessing the differences between hughi and her potential cohabitees. Looking at specimens like this can make it all feel too easy. They were clearly different – auritus has longer ears, dauricus was blonder and hughi had those distinctive dark-tipped spines. But would life in the field be so kind to us? After all, at least one of these hogs before me was used as a type specimen. There might be, as some authors suggest, quite considerable overlap between the species. In fact, some have gone so far as to suggest that there are far fewer than the twenty species mentioned by Nigel Reeve.

  Still, my spirits were up. It was time to book a flight to China, meet Professor Wang Song and go find hughi. It is rare to find an academic so enthusiastic with an amateur enquiry and I was excited that I had not only his support but also his offer of travelling with me on a mission.

  However, he had vanished. No replies came to my emails. So I waited a week and dropped him another line. Nothing. Waited a week and sent another email. Nothing. There were not quite beads of sweat forming, but there was a little knot of anxiety. He had made it clear he was going to be available for some of the month of June. Could I just accept that he would be free? Should I jump on a plane and hope that he would be around?

  I waited another couple of weeks, sending regular emails. Fang Fang, a good friend of mine, is from China, so I persuaded her to phone the Instit
ute of Zoology to see where the good professor was. No one knew.

  I emailed more. I even phoned – hopelessly, because I speak no Mandarin, apart from hello, kiss and, obviously, hedgehog. Ni hao, chin chin and ci wei.

  But nothing. I began to wonder about heading to China to look for Wang Song.

  A search for him would require a guide, so I started to hunt for a guide to help me find Wang Song, who would help me find my hedgehog. I said it was not going to be simple.

  A few false starts and then Roz Kidman Cox, former editor of the BBC Wildlife Magazine and the person who is perhaps most responsible for me doing what I am doing now (you can send letters of complaint to her in Bristol), told me about a fixer who had been working for the BBC in Beijing on a natural history series, setting up the filming of the weasels who have made their home in the centre of Beijing among the hutongs, the old back streets. An email to Poppy Toland was replied to immediately, with the added good fortune that she was in London, visiting family. No need to find a guide to find her at least.

  She agreed to work with me. Not as prestigious as the BBC, but I think she was won over by the charm – of the hedgehog.

  So, many months after I had originally planned to go, everything was in place. Ticket booked and visa queued for (in the spirit of sharing top tips for travel in China, go early to queue for the visa and go early to pick it up).

  The bureaucracy was intense. The Forestry Department needed to know what we were up to, copies of visas and passports were sent, a letter from the British Hedgehog Preservation Society identifying me as a responsible hedgehog fanatic was written. And still there were problems.